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HOLLYWOOD S INVISIBLE MEN 209
Hail, it took twenty men ten hours for one tree. In winter, the leaves are good for about ten days before they begin to dry up and go limp on us. Sometimes it works the other way around. In making North West Mounted Police, we had to bring trees down from the mountains to mask out our sound stages and the RKO water tower in the background. We lugged in six hundred pine trees, eighty to ninety feet high, and set them up so thickly on our lot that you couldn't see through them. When we got through, we had a forest so dense that Hansel and Gretel could have got lost in it for weeks and found a gingerbread house built like the Taj Mahal to boot. The trees in the rear ranks we set up on steel parallel bars sixty feet high, to obtain the appearance of a forest gradually climbing a mountainside."
When it came to getting ready for one of the Crosby, Hope Road, productions, Road to Utopia, Holmes sent men up to an altitude of 11,000 feet to install trees above the timber line. These men had to have their blood pressure and hearts checked before being exposed to such thin atmospheric conditions.
Holmes has quite a sizable collection of tree trunks in storage. "Every once in a while," he says, "people call up and say they have a tree they want taken out of the ground, and do we need it? I go out and look at it, and if it looks usable I bring it in." In his time he has moved twenty-five-foot Joshua trees and big organ cacti fifteen feet high.
According to Holmes, a graduate of a horticultural school would be a poor man for his job. Holmes says sadly, "He wouldn't realize that our greenery is in front of a camera only ten minutes or less. He would be thinking in long-time terms and how the stuff would look ten years from now."
Holmes hates to wait on a leisurely Mother Nature for his flora to flower and grow lush. There are ways to speed a plant's growth in the greenhouse by judicious use of heat, water and chemical fertilizer. And Holmes counts heavily on such shot-in-the-arm methods to get behind roots and push.
The studio maintains two hothouses and a huge shed in which